Siet-Lang Lai

Motivation One nice feature of the Java language is having many useful programming facilities (or APIs) built into its core language packages. To write a client/server application, one can use the socket classes in the java.net package by modifying from any existing client/server codes. For instance, David Flanagan's "Java in a Nutshell" book (pp.145 to 148) [1] provides sample codes for implementing client and server with multi-threading features. However, it depends on your application. You may need to replace the readLine() and println() methods of the DataInputStream and PrintStream classes respectively with appropriate I/O methods (e.g. readInt(), writeFloat() etc.) of the respective subclasses of the InputStream and OutputStream I/O classes in the java.io package. In this way, one can write client/server applications by manually modifying and extending Java c... (more)

Slide Show on the Web Using SMIL

The explosive growth of multimedia on the Web has produced interactive applications with dynamic and rich content. The exponential evolution of the Web and the integration of various media, such as text, graphics, streaming video, audio, and animation, has created the need for interoperable or standard ways to describe the synchronization between the different media with temporal behavior. In June 1998 the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) released the Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL: pronounced "smile") specification that represented a cross-industry effort to ... (more)

Control Appliances Using WML and Java Servlets

The Internet has become part of our daily lifestyle. With the convergence of communication and computers, and proliferation in the use of the Internet and mobile gadgets, information is readily available in many different forms, such as data, voice, video or even control devices. The control of appliances anywhere, anytime, is no longer the stuff of science fiction. Today the Internet connects not only computing resources and people, but also appliances such as air-conditioning and lighting. The convergence of data and control networks enables corporations and individuals to acce... (more)

How to Transform Static Data Descriptors for Audio and Images on the Web

Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language - or SMIL, pronounced smile - is an XML application and currently a W3C recommendation. The basic idea of SMIL is to give media components - text, images, audio, video, and the like - a URL and to allow you to control what, where, when, and how the media components appear in a dynamic multimedia presentation. For instance, you could specify the layout of the presentation ("where"); various media elements like audio or image ("what"); temporal association ("when"), e.g., a text element appears 5 seconds after an image is shown; and the... (more)

A Multi-Agent Meeting Organizer

Almost every working professional has experienced the tedium and frustration that results from scheduling a meeting for multiple attendees with potentially conflicting schedules plus additional constraints imposed by the meeting rooms and other resources. This problem deserves serious attention as many people in typical organizations have to spend a large portion of their working time in scheduling and attending meetings. With autonomous agents [1], which can schedule meetings and manage calendars on behalf of their users, the savings in time and effort can be tremendous. Users c... (more)